


The winners write their own history

by cosmic_kid



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 07:46:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4383332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_kid/pseuds/cosmic_kid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You'd be surprised how much time Pansy Parkinson spends in the Muggle world these days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The winners write their own history

You’d be surprised how much time Pansy Parkinson spends in the Muggle world these days.

She never realized how big it was. How there are a hundred-thousand streets like Diagon Alley spreading out through Muggle London, more eyes than she could ever want to count, more faces and none of them, not a single one, look at her for more than second or two. Some men call out to her at the pub; some ladies pass her their phone numbers. But that’s all. There’s no Pansy here, just a hard-faced girl with careful eyes and a hand that goes quick to her pocket as if she’s got a gun loaded there.

Well. She does. But no one has to know that. A wand’s a stick here. Magic’s a myth. Maybe Pansy likes that sometimes. All of it- just a story, and at the end everyone’s left whole.

You’d think putting a hundred lives ahead of one wouldn’t be such an awful thing, would you? And what had Potter ever done for any of them except ignore them or despise them, except let a hand go unshaken, an impression go uncorrected, and he never understood how it’s easy to hate when you know the opposite of hate isn’t acceptance, it’s exile. All Potter ever had to face was death, and it didn’t matter how many went down alongside him. That’s the problem with noble ambition- the collateral is outstanding. Pansy prefers the Slytherin sort of ambition; the cunning sort, the jealous sort, the personal sort, where your circle is smaller and the damage is much less.

She still hates these Muggles but that’s all right. For once Pansy likes to be the one silently seething as she stares at passing faces. Wars have winners and losers. No one much thinks about the losers.

She leaves through the Leaky Cauldron and one night someone grabs her arm. It’s too hot for an English summer, far too hot, even with the night veiled hazy and under-lit it’s still as hot as if the sun were roaring right overhead. Pansy feels fingers around her bare skin and there’s a girl behind her, a girl she thinks she might know, or remember, a girl with a scarred face- but that’s not abnormal now, everyone has scars and maybe Pansy should be glad of that at least. If everyone is marked and marred and ravaged there can’t be a single savior anymore.

“What do you want?” Pansy growls. She’s not in the mood for misplaced retribution, for displaced anger, for the feelings that still persist even after the battle’s been won. They’re all so good but they still want to burn the world around them. They want revenge too. Pansy’s got half a foot into Muggle London, half a foot into a world where no one knows a damn thing about her and she’s not going to let this woman hold her back.

“Parkinson, right? I hear you go hang out with Muggles now.”

“What’s it to you?”

“You know who I am?”

“No, but that doesn’t matter much.”

The woman rubs a hand across her face and her make-up smears and there’s the faint outline of raw red marks that spell out a single word: SNEAK.

Ah. Yes. Of course. Pansy’s grin is savage, knowing. She stares for a moment with her hard eyes and she understands 

“Want to come with me?” 

“Yeah,” says Marietta Edgecombe. 

_

Here’s the thing about child soldiers: you have to develop a way of looking at the world that won’t drive you mad. You have to build justifications out of sand or clay, twine or metal, you have to hold fast to eroding foundations and pray the rust won’t get into your bloodstream and poison you for good. This isn’t a war you started and it’s not a war you wanted and you wanted to be a kid but your parents can’t conceptualize a future where they’ve lost even while they’re losing. So you find a way to make it work for you and you wash the blood off your hands and you remember your homework at the last minute and scribble something down right before running off to class.

You stand up in a crowded room and tell them that killing one boy isn’t the same as killing a hundred.

You weigh the balance of people who love you and people who don’t and you do what you believe you have to.

And the sick thing of it is in the end, it doesn’t matter. Whatever you bled yourself dry building they’ll tear it down anyway. No one fights the same war. 

_

Pansy never loved Draco Malfoy, but she is a Slytherin, and Malfoy meant power and he meant shoring up a loyal network of families and friends and admirers, and sometimes love isn’t the whole of it, or even the half of it. 

Pansy doesn’t love Marietta Edgecombe but she is a Slytherin, and there’s a different sort of loyalty now, a different sort of ambition. A collection of traitors. A hierarchy of scars, and both hers and Marietta’s are found wanting. The first time Pansy kisses Marietta she smears her make-up and kisses the latticework-brand that Granger dug across Marietta’s face. Marietta flinches the first time, but then never again.

They go out in Muggle London with hands held tight, in the wildest Muggle fashions they can find. They dance in sweaty clubs and drink heady Muggle liquor and they stumble back toward Diagon Alley covered in glitter and smudged lipstick. They mark themselves now. One stale early morning, when the dark hasn’t yet faded but it’s ragged at the edges, Pansy and Marietta pass a young girl being set upon by a feral pack of ravenous men and Pansy curses the men until they are unrecognizable.

Slytherins can be brave. Marietta says she wasn’t aware of this, and Pansy sneers at her. Ravenclaws can be stupid. Marietta twists her mouth into a wry grin. 

“Oh no. But sometimes we wish we could be. If I hadn’t been so smart I never would have gone to Umbridge about the others.”

Pansy’s sneer turns into her own wry grin. “Slytherins and Ravenclaws have more in common than people ever imagine.

_

Pansy wakes up next to Marietta, her curly hair spread out in massive waves along the white sheets. Pansy can’t remember if they are in Muggle London or if they are in her flat or if they are in Hogwarts or her parent’s manor house or, or, or- and then there are car horns outside and a million voices and Pansy remembers. She looks out the dirty window, looks out through the smeared morning and she hears Marietta stir.

“Would you have really given them Potter?” she asks in a bleary voice.

“Of course,” Pansy says without a moment’s hesitation. She hooks her fingers under the sill and lifts the window open. Paint chips flick off, land on her arms. The humid air billows in, the smells of the city, the horrible, ugly, beautiful sense of anonymity in a wide gray city that doesn’t know creatures like Pansy and Marietta exist. That doesn’t care. “There were kids in there, remember. Little kids.”

“But that wasn’t Potter’s fault,” Marietta says. Ever the Ravenclaw. Not just two sides to a debate but infinite sides. 

Pansy thinks that’s a matter of perspective, but she doesn’t want to argue. “Perhaps not, but it certainly wasn’t those kids’ faults either.”

_

Draco and Daphne and Blaise and the rest ask Pansy where she goes. They are her friends still, these children- ragged children yes, just like her- but Draco’s mother saved Potter’s life and Daphne and Blaise and the others never stood in front of a hundred people and ordered their savior dead. 

_

Marietta’s friend Cho comes with them every once in a while. Pansy thought she’d mind, but she really doesn’t. (Even the fact that Marietta and Cho sleep together doesn’t bother her- Pansy doesn’t love Marietta, she loves her scars, which is an incredibly welcome thing for a girl who believed for the rest of her life she’d only be loved in spite of them) After all, being Potter’s cast-off can’t be an easy thing. There’s a ferocious strength of feeling to Cho, a rage of grief, an inability to be anything but herself. Ever the Ravenclaw. Potter thought there was weakness in that, but then that just shows you he was the real fool. 

Cho kept a promise of friendship. She kept a courageous promise. Morality is for the victors. How quickly they forget what it meant to fight a war you never made. Marietta kept a promise of family, and how easy that is to shrug aside when all you’ve ever had to be is perfect. Pansy kept a promise of protection, for her fellow Slytherins, for a bunch of eleven-year-old kids about to be steamrolled in a grown-up’s war all because of a single boy. 

In Muggle London, no one knows their names.

In Muggle London, no one knows their stories. 

Gryffindors may think they have claim over bravery, but that’s easy when you’re on the winning side, when it’s your own history you get to write.


End file.
